JUST MY LUCK

Everything goes right for ultra-fortunate Ashley Albright (Lindsay Lohan) in Just My Luck. Manhattan cabs screech to a halt whenever she needs them, lottery tickets inevitably pay off for her, sample sales yield designer duds for a song, and the sun comes out in a rainstorm the minute she leaves her home. But when she kisses a stranger, perpetual hard-luck loser Jake (Chris Pine), her good fortune is reversed: She loses her job, her dress is splattered with mud, and she winds up in jail. Her mission then becomes to find the now beneficently successful Jake's whereabouts so she can buss him again and regain her formerly blithe status.

"I'm the luckiest girl alive!" exclaims Lohan at periodic intervals in this film, and one can only agree wholeheartedly with her. How this cute, but nothing-really-special ingénue has somehow morphed into such a whoppingly huge movie star is a mystery for the ages. An unquenchable spunkiness seems to be her major screen quality (though not half as absorbing as the real-life antics which have consistently landed her in tabloid pages). To be sure, she's defeated by the gratingly formulaic concept of her latest film. Director Donald Petrie and screenwriters I. Marlene King and Amy B. Harris ladle on the samples of Ashley's good and, particularly, bad luck so insistently that the film can barely breathe beneath the non-stop barrage of low-comedy shtick. The movie also has an unseemly fascination with excrement, ranging from a five-dollar bill smeared with doggie poo to a millionaire's estimation of how much money he collects while "making doodoo," to a "modern" sculpture that literally defecates. Also offensive is the racial stereotyping of black characters, who range from subservient doormen and that aforementioned millionaire, a crass dummy of a record producer (Faizon Love), to his nubile assistant (Makenzie Vega), whom Ashley refers to as a 'ho, as well as a butch female prison inmate who twice sucker-punches our beset heroine.

Pine makes a bland romantic partner for Lohan: Theirs is a synthetic chemistry, if anything. The always game, hilariously named Missi Pyle does what she can as Ashley's bitchy boss. Bree Turner and Samaire Armstrong, cast as the star's handmaiden girlfriends, coo and sigh from the sidelines, as that is all they're basically given to do. Tovah Feldshuh chews scenery as a gypsy fortuneteller who tries to advise Ashley, at one point breaking into a muttered/sung impromptu rendition of "Otchi Tchornya" which is the one spontaneous moment in this airless, calculatedly commercial enterprise.